editorial feature
Call of the DUNES
I packed my car with everything I thought I would need, which meant I packed too much—plastic bins of pink, purple, and blue velvet, silks, and cottons. There is no electricity in the dunes, no sewing machine, no wires that lead to plugs in the wall, only solar lamps and oil and the stability of stars. When one arrives at the edge of the earth, you greet her with reverence. The seals know, too, that this is a sacred place. The black racerback was the first familiar one, and it told stories of its travels. I spent the days with mouthfuls of salt and wet sand, sweetness of rose hip and beach plum—between the season of nesting plovers and the inundation of big trucks. Landing in the dunes was like landing in that soft place in my chest. An opening up, making my edges like water. To be clear, I came in with an outline in the shape of my spirit, but didn’t know how to fill it. Entering the dune shack was another portal, the shadows of joy and grief live within the walls of this place and its pages. I wrapped myself inside of them every night, the sound of the waves and the coyotes calling me to them or to sleep. Tracing my experience through the rise and fall of the dunes, I harvested goldenrod, to make what would become the binding of a quilt. I follow in this lineage of ceremony as a way to honor, as a way to protect, a gift. I spent evenings stitching by headlamp, sewing a memory project, a portrait of the land, of this blessed thing. I placed items inside the quilt before finishing the binding to deliver the contents of dreaming—goldenrod, dune grass, sand, and rosehip. The sharing, the giving—the friends who made the trek through scrub oaks toward the ocean to find me nestled between the dunes and the sky, my head up toward heaven, praying, and remembering how we survived. I swam like a seal on my last full day there, joyous that I had been set free for this moment to be with the movement of water, the reaching toward the shore and the release. When I left, Beth said, "This is the most anyone has ever packed." I smiled, knowing now that I needed even less to survive. — River Aragon, 2026